The officer points to a metal chair opposite her. It screeches as Kawsar pulls it along the concrete floor. The chair is tall and her toes can just about reach the floor when she sits down; a small murmur of pleasure comes from her as she relaxes into the padded plastic seat.
‘I am Officer Adan Ali.’ The woman clears her throat before continuing. ‘I am investigating the disturbance today at the October Twenty-first parade in Hargeisa stadium. What is your name?’ She produces a notebook and pen from her lap and jots down Kawsar’s name, neighbourhood, age, marital status, clan details. She has the same concentrated intensity to her face as Hodan once had.
There is a pause before either of them speak again. Kawsar takes in the solitary decoration in the room – a poster taped askew to the back wall showing Ogadeen refugees huddled under an acacia tree in one half and the same refugees smiling broadly in a fishing boat after they have been resettled by the government in the other segment; her eyes keep meeting those of a teenage boy in the picture instead of her interrogator’s.
Officer Adan Ali tugs at her collar and brushes a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘It was reported that you tried to assault members of the Guddi. What do you have to say in reply to this accusation?’
‘I neither raised my hand to anyone nor threatened to,’ Kawsar explains.
‘Are you saying the Guddi are lying?’
Kawsar hesitates and takes a deep breath. ‘Yes.’
Violent writing into the notebook. ‘You understand that defamation of public workers is an offence?’
‘An offence to God? To you? To me?’
‘To the country.’
Kawsar shrugs her contempt.
Officer Adan Ali slams the pen onto the table and throws her back against her chair; another petulant little girl in authority.
Filsan feels her leg jiggling underneath the table; it is a nervous habit that appears when she is about to lose her temper. This is her first ever interrogation; she had walked into the police station and demanded to see the old woman. The nightshirt guards were already red-eyed and bleary and let her in without much discussion. She had wanted to clear her head, focus on work rather than what had just happened in Haaruun’s car. Deep down she is terrified of returning alone to her little room. This old woman, Kawsar, has not only cleared her mind but is kindling a fire of anger in it; she thinks she is a gangster or something, refusing to look at Filsan and shrugging nonchalantly at questions.
Filsan has forgotten a standard question and she asks it now. ‘Do you have any children?’
‘Not anymore.’
Filsan’s suspicion grows; if the mother is this disrespectful, maybe she has sons amongst the rebels in Ethiopia or in the Gulf, sending them money. ‘When did they leave the country?’
Kawsar sighs. ‘About five years ago.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘Heaven.’
Another pause.
‘Do you think this is a game? If I want to I can make you disappear into Mandera or prisons that you have never heard of, where no one will find you.’
Filsan wants to take a hammer to her face. For some reason people feel they don’t need to respect her. ‘I am going to give you one last chance: tell me what happened between you and the Guddi.’
Kawsar spreads her hands on the table, her wrists just bone and bulging veins; the fingers curve as if the knuckles need oiling, the henna on her nails half grown out leaving small harvest moons at the tips.
‘I went to the stadium as instructed. I sat quietly with my neighbours watching the parade. I am old, I am tired, I have no energy for these all day events but I obeyed. I saw a scrap of a girl dancing in the stadium until she was dragged away by the Guddi.’
‘That is when you intervened?’ Filsan’s heart rate slows down.
‘Yes. They were thrashing her, four or five of them against a child. I didn’t want to just watch.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I approached and told them to stop. I didn’t touch anyone but I was pushed more than once.’
‘What happened to the girl after you flew to her rescue?’
‘She ran away.’
‘Is this your first conflict with public officials?’
‘I was once fined.’
‘Why?’
‘I was wrongly accused.’
‘What of?’ snaps Filsan.
‘Listening to NFM radio,’ murmurs Kawsar.
‘Are any of your family mixed up with the rebels?’
‘I don’t have family. I am alone.’
‘So why is a woman of your age tuning into childish propaganda?’
‘I wasn’t, but even if I did, aren’t these my own ears? Given by God to do with as I please?’ Kawsar’s hand flicks her right ear lobe.
The blows come one after the other. The first to her ear as loud as a wave hitting a rock, then to her temple, cheek, neck. For a moment they stop as Kawsar clutches Officer Adan Ali’s hands in hers but after a few heartbeats they resume. A swirl of sound and sight engulfs her until a punch to the chest knocks her from the chair onto the cement floor. Landing on her hip, Kawsar hears a crack beneath her and then feels a river of pain swelling up from her stomach to her throat, obstructing her breath. Resting her weight on one hand, she lifts an open palm to the soldier. ‘Please stop!’ she cries.
The girl shakes her head, tears in her own eyes, and rushes out of the room. The thud of her boots as she runs down the corridor gets quieter and disappears.
Every millimetre of movement electrifies Kawsar’s nerves. She can neither pick herself up nor lie flat on the ground but is fixed in an awkward, lop-sided pose. Her head sways with the enormity of the pain pulsing through her body, bile at the back of her tongue. Even if someone did arrive to help, how could she let them move her? It would be better to take a bullet to the back of the head. Her palms are clammy and she loses her grip, slipping closer to the ground, where drops of blood stain the white concrete. Kawsar licks her upper lip and tastes more blood. She rubs a hand under her nose; it comes away red.
The door is flung open and the policewoman with the blonde highlights and a man gather around her.
‘What the hell did you say?’ the policewoman asks, leaning over Kawsar’s face.
‘Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! I beg you,’ Kawsar sobs.
The policewoman hooks her under the arms while the policeman grabs her ankles.
‘My hip is broken. In the name of God, put me down, I beg you, put me down . . .’ Her words become screams as they lift her into the air.
They shuffle out of the interrogation room and a curtain of black descends over Kawsar’s eyes, all feeling and hearing fading away.
Hidden in a narrow alleyway, Deqo peeps out at the crowd that has gathered outside the police station. Around ten women in red robes shout at a policeman, more policemen arrive and the women retreat but continue to shout. ‘Give her to us,’ she hears one say.
A civilian car drives past and one woman jumps out in front of it, banging on the windscreen until it stops and the driver steps out to speak with her. Behind them the shouting ceases as a prostrate figure emerges on a stretcher between two young policemen.
Deqo tiptoes out into the street, the area suddenly bright as cars slow to observe the commotion, their headlights revealing the face of the woman on the stretcher.
It is her.
Deqo rushes across the road. Nobody seems to see her; this is a trick she has, the power to become invisible. She wipes the blood away from her saviour’s face and pats her cheek. The women are shouting over her head, one older woman threatening the police with a cane; two of them take hold of the stretcher and push it into the open doors of the waiting car.
The car doors slam before Deqo can slip inside with them. A squeak, a crunch and the car starts, throwing up a plume of dust into her face. She chases its lights through the darkness, a pair of eyes looking back at her through the rear window. Deqo looks down at her garments glowing ghostly white and h
er limbs paled to the same colour. She realises how far away Saba’ad is, how exciting her life has become in the few hours she has been in Hargeisa, and she knows she cannot go back. The car begins to pull away from her and she quickens her pace, her legs eating up the road; the car turns and she follows, her feet now numb. Another acceleration and Deqo strains to keep up, her heart banging against her ribs. Her eyes focussed on the lights ahead, she misses the large pothole right ahead of her and falls in, scraping her knee and collapsing into it. The car slows to turn another corner and then disappears. Deqo is alone once more.
PART TWO
DEQO
Deqo steps barefoot across the festering mulch that slides beneath her feet. Her red plastic thong sandals hang delicately from her fingers, and beads of water drip from the trees as if the branches are shaking their fingers dry, splashing her face and neck in mischief. She hides behind the wide trunk of a willow near two crouched figures, her face framed in a scorched cleft where lightning has flung itself in a careless fit. She whispers her name to give herself courage. The men’s talk is distorted by the music of raindrops falling over thousands of trees in the ditch, their leaves held out like waxy green tongues. The drought that had tormented her in Saba’ad is over, but she is in no mood to enjoy the downpour.
On either side of the trees are the stray dogs, thieves and promenading ghosts of Hargeisa. The swish of cars crossing the bridge and the susurrations of secret policemen come to her through the darkness. The barrel in which she sleeps is cold, too cold. The scraps of cut-off fabric that usually line the bottom are floating in kerosene-rippled water, the emeralds and sapphires of a peacock’s tail flashing on its moonlit surface. She shivered with goose-pimpled skin for as long as she could bear it and then sought out the drunks and their fire in a moment of reckless desperation; she wonders what they will do for her, to her. She wants to know if hyenas can only be hyenas when confronted with a lamb. The heat of the men’s fire blows over her, its crackling and its colours warming her. They have built a bombastic blaze, full of their alcohol; it lurches at the dark, quivering trees before stumbling and falling back into the barrel. She breathes in the smell of damp smoke, the taste of fresh ash.
‘Waryaa, hus! Can you hear something, Rabbit?’ one of the drunks slurs to his companion.
‘Oh Brother Faruur, only the complaints of my poor stomach,’ the other replies.
Faruur doesn’t reply, his ear cocked to the side, his face concentrated and stern. He reminds Deqo of a dog, his body taut, his ear attuned to the hiss of faint breath, his twitching nose-hairs trapping and tasting the sour-sweet odour of blood.
‘There is someone over there in the bushes,’ Faruur says triumphantly.
Deqo steps out with a thudding heart, preferring to reveal herself than be caught; she marches straight to the burning barrel and puts her palms out to drink in the heat. Her brazenness works; Faruur and the other man look down in confused silence, both of them anxious that their hallucinations have returned.
The fire holds her hands and beckons her closer. It is like bathing but without the sting of water in her eyes or the awkward exposure of her naked body while unseen eyes watch.
Faruur’s eyes are sick soups of yellow and pink, glossy like an infant’s, the bottom lids slack. He looks Deqo up and down.
‘Get away from here, from our fire!’ He picks up a piece of wood with a nail spiking out and grasps it aloft as if to strike her. Beside his unlaced shoes leans a bottle of surgical spirit, half drunk.
Deqo meets his gaze. He thinks he can chase her away, they all think that. ‘Man, be a Muslim. Let me get warm and then I’ll leave you in peace.’
Faruur keeps his arm up and Deqo remains calmly by the fire, her hands like two explosions. Slowly his arm relaxes and falls to his side, the weapon still in his hand.
The other drunk reaches out to grab at her thigh; she jumps quickly beyond his reach. ‘Oof! Go grab your father, you disgusting old lizard,’ she shouts.
The two look to each other and laugh, the hacking, husky, wheezy laughter of men with tuberculosis.
‘Now, look here, Rabbit, we go to the effort of building a fire, collecting wood, buying matches, sacrificing our precious alcohol to get it started on this wet, godforsaken evening, and then this . . . this kintir . . . this overgrown cunt comes along to steal our heat.’ A moth flits around Faruur’s head as he speaks. ‘What has the world come to?’
Rabbit raises his hands in mock prayer and gazes up at the dark-veiled heavens. ‘Let the end be soon, there are only so many injustices a man can stand before he despairs.’
Deqo readies herself to run in case they both come at her; her skin is hot, her muscles limber, she can disappear into the night as if winged.
Faruur throws his stick to the ground and waves his hand dismissively at Deqo. ‘Do what you like. I am too old, drunk and cold to chase after anyone.’ He bends down and picks up his bottle.
Deqo hopes they will fall asleep soon so she can spend the night beside the fire, warm and well, rather than wide-eyed in her barrel, her knees pressed up against her chin, her back against the cold metal, trapped like a breech birth in a hard, dead womb.
Rabbit and Faruur are pulling at their bottles, eyes sealed, as peaceful and distant as infants drugged with breast milk and soft, scented lullabies.
She has seen these two in town, laid out along the steps of the warehouses near the hospital, sleeping through the hot, shuttered hours between noon and afternoon prayers; the hours which she spends collecting guavas, pomegranates, mangoes, bananas and papayas from the farms along the ditch. She gathers them in a cloth sheet which she spreads in the faqir market, guarding her patch until the sun relents and the maids and cooks appear with their straw baskets to purchase cheap food for their own families. She makes up to fifty shillings a day like this – enough to buy a baguette filled with fried lamb, onions and potatoes. Girls are not allowed into the teashops so she has to eyeball the schoolboys until she finds one honest-looking enough to go in for her. She has only been fooled once, taunted through the glass door as the khaki-uniformed boy stuffed her baguette into his grinning mouth, his hips swinging side to side as he scoffed it. She kicked him hard in the stomach when he finally ambled out of the teahouse, her daily bread tight and swollen under his skin.
She hates schoolboys. There are, in fact, only a few people whom she likes: Bashir, who sells well water from the back of his donkey but fills her tin cup for free; Qamar, the tall, plump, fragrant divorcee who wraps her up in fat arms and pets and kisses her in the market; and the blind ma’alim, Eid, who teaches the market boys and girls Kitab under a willow tree near the museum.
Rabbit’s sarong has gathered up around his knees, his snores quietly audible beneath the fire’s burning. Her legs are tired, her eyelids eager to drop, but she can’t sleep here with them. She sits down heavily on the mulch and crosses her legs. She will wait until the sunrise and then tip out the water from her barrel and sleep for a couple of hours.
A dawn loud with bird song erupts around her, black wings flapping in the diffuse sunlight between the trees. Deqo quickly turns to where the drunks were sleeping and is relieved to find them still slumbering in a heap by the burnt-out fire. She gets to her feet and heads for the pathway to Hargeisa Bridge. It is early enough for her to reach the central mosque before the free bread and tea they give out in the morning is exhausted. Already the heat has dried the night’s rainfall; only a faint dampness remains in the undergrowth, causing her plastic thongs to squeak. She had found them blown beneath a whodead stall one evening, too bartered for the stall holder to bother picking up before he rushed home for the curfew. They don’t match, one being larger than the other, but they stay on her feet. She has grabbed all of her clothing from the wind: a white shirt caught on a thorn tree, a red dress tumbling abandoned by the roadside, cotton trousers thrown over a power line. She dresses in these items that ghosts have left behind and becomes an even greater ghost herself, unseen by passe
rs-by, tripped over, stepped on.
Clutching onto the scrub she pulls herself up the steep embankment, avoiding the thorns pressing into her skin and the excrement piled up in the dirt. There are only two bridges across the ditch, this concrete one and another made of rope near the Sha’ab quarter that swings precariously as you cross it. The bushes beneath the concrete bridge are crammed full of rubbish from the pedestrians above. In the six or so weeks Deqo has been in Hargeisa she has met many people she knows or dimly recognises from the camp along this bridge. The men stand out in sarongs of navy and maroon check, probably sold all over Ogaden by one trader from Dire Dawa. These men look uniformly old and familiar: sunken cheeked, bow-legged, hunchbacked and wild-haired. Some meet her gaze with a sharp, sidelong glance that pierces the clouds of her memory, and then she remembers them from Saba’ad: he rented out a wheelbarrow, he volunteered at the clinic, he sold goat milk.
There are only a few people crossing the bridge today, and she can run her hands along the peeling white iron railings without moving aside for anyone. Toyotas and trucks slow down beside her to navigate the gutted tarmac of the bridge. As she crosses from north to south Hargeisa she hears chanting. A flotilla of small clenched fists appears in the distance, approaching her as if pulled in by the tide. Local schoolboys and girls in pastel-coloured uniforms pump the air shouting, ‘No more arrests, no more killing, no more dictatorship!’ Their faces are frank and happy, the outlines of their individual bodies obscured by the flow of their movement. They block the road ahead so Deqo waits on the bridge to get a closer look at them. The bridge vibrates underneath, one hundred or two hundred feet drumming on the fragile structure. Deqo can see a few children without uniforms and some young men, too old for school, within the group. They sing a song she has never heard before: ‘Hargeisa ha noolaato, long live Hargeisa.’ The children closest to her look her up and down and scrunch up their noses.
Deqo wraps her arms around the iron railings behind her back and stares as the children make a spectacle of themselves. She has spent her whole life observing; hers are the eyes that always peer from behind walls or rocks, infuriating everyone with their watchfulness. But since she lost her friend Anab there is no one to lie down with at night, no one to divulge her secrets to; instead they put down roots in her mind and grow in the mulch of her confused life.
The Orchard of Lost Souls Page 4